Microsoft announces Xbox Game Pass subscription service

The Xbox team have announced a new gaming subscription service called Xbox Game Pass. The service will give gamers unlimited access to over 100 Xbox One and Xbox 360 backward compatible games on Xbox One for £7.99 ($9.99) a month.

Xbox Game Pass began rolling out to select members of the Xbox Insider Program at 2pm GMT earlier today (Feb 28th 2017). It will launch to the broader community later this spring. Xbox Insider members may need to reboot to get the update.

One of the best things about Xbox Game Pass is that titles can be downloaded direct to your Xbox One. That means there’s no need to worry about streaming, bandwidth or network connectivity while playing.

In addition, all Xbox One games in the catalog – and related add-ons – will be available to purchase at an exclusive discount for Xbox Game Pass members, so you can make the games you love part of your permanent library to play whenever you want. Every month new games will cycle into the subscription with some cycling out, giving you a constantly-updating library of games.

A few things about the initial Xbox Game Pass rollout for Xbox Insider Program members:

As is common with new features and programs going into preview, Xbox Game Pass will be an early build with some feature limitations and will not be on par with the final experience that will be available later this spring.

Most notable for users in the Xbox Insider Program will be a limited catalogue (i.e. approximately 20 titles in preview, many of them arcade) and potentially some slight tweaks to the user interface.

Most AAA titles in the Xbox Game Pass catalogue will begin appearing when the program launches to the broader Xbox community later this spring.

You can expect to run into bugs while in the Xbox Insider Program. Note that the main focus of Preview is to test features and report bugs so the team can refine the experience before it launches broadly.

Xbox Game Pass will initially launch to the Xbox Insider Program without full localisation, meaning the product description and channel names will appear in English. When the program launches to the broader Xbox community later this spring, the product description and channel names will be localised appropriately.

Some of the great titles coming later this spring when Xbox Game Pass launches to the broader Xbox community include: Halo 5: Guardians, Saints Row IV Re-Elected, NBA 2K16, Mad Max, LEGO Batman, Mega Man Legacy Collection, Terraria, Payday 2, Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, Fable III, SoulCalibur II and Tekken Tag 2. Note that these titles will not be part of the Xbox Insider Program.